Top rankings for Abolitionism

Wikipedia article:

Map showing all locations mentioned on Wikipedia article:

Abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and emancipate slaves in western Europe and the Americas. The slave system aroused little
protest until the 18th century, when rationalist thinkers of the
Enlightenment criticized it for
violating the rights of man, and Quaker and
other evangelical religious groups condemned it as un-Christian.
Though
antislavery sentiments were widespread by the late 18th century,
they had little immediate effect on the centers of slavery: the
West
Indies, South America, and the Southern United States.
Britain banned the importation of African
slaves in its colonies in 1807, and the United States followed
in 1808. The British West Indies
abolished slavery in 1827 and the French colonies abolished it 15 years
later.

Slavery was abolished in Latin America
during the Independence Wars (1810–1822), but slavery remained a
practice in the region up to 1888 in Brazil, as well as having long
life in the remaining Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. In
some parts of Africa and in much of the Islamic world, it persisted as a legal
institution well into the 20th century.

Abolitionism was preceded by the New Laws of the Indies in 1542, in which
Emperor Charles V declared free
all Native
American slaves, abolishing slavery of these races, and
declaring them citizens of the Empire with full rights. The move
was inspired by writings of the Spanish monk Bartolome de las Casas and the
School of Salamanca. Spanish
settlers replaced the Native American slaves with enslaved laborers
brought from Africa, so did not abolish slavery altogether.

Today, child and adult slavery and forced
labour are illegal in most countries, as well as being against
international law. Because slavery
still exists, however, with an estimated 27 million people enslaved
worldwide, a new international abolitionist movement has recently
emerged.

Slavery in Great Britain

The last known form of enforced servitude of adults (villeinage) had disappeared in Britain at the
beginning of the seventeenth century. But by the eighteenth
century, traders began to import African and Indian and East Asian
slaves to London and Edinburgh to work as personal servants. They were not
bought or sold, and their legal status was unclear until 1772, when
the case of a runaway slave named James Somersett forced a legal
decision. The owner, Charles Steuart, had attempted to
abduct him and send him to Jamaica to work on
the sugar plantations. While in London, Somersett had been
baptised and his godparents issued a writ of
habeas corpus. As a result
Lord
Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court
of the King's Bench, had to judge whether the abduction was
legal or not under English Common Law, as
there was no legislation for slavery in England.

In his judgment of 22 June 1772, Mansfield declared: "Whatever
inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say
this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and
therefore the black must be discharged." Although the exact legal implications of the
judgement are actually unclear when analysed by lawyers, it was
generally taken at the time to have decided that the condition of
slavery did not exist under English law
in England. This judgment emancipated the ten to fourteen thousand
slaves or possible slaves in England, who were mostly domestic
servants. It also laid down the principle that slavery contracted
in other jurisdictions (such as the American colonies) could not be
enforced in England.

After reading about the Somersett's Case, an enslaved African in
Scotland, Joseph Knight, left
his master John Wedderburn. A similar case to Steuart's was brought
by Wedderburn in 1776, with the same result: chattel slavery was ruled not to exist under the
law of Scotland. Nonetheless,
legally mandated, hereditary slavery of Scots in Scotland existed
from 1606 until 1799, when colliers and
salters were legally emancipated by an act of the Parliament of Great Britain (39
Geo.III. c56). A prior law enacted in 1775 (15 Geo.III. c. 28) was
intended to end what the act referred to as "a state of slavery and
bondage" but it was ineffectual, necessitating the 1799 act.

First steps

Despite the ending of slavery in Great Britain, slavery was a
strong institution in the Southern
Colonies of British America and
the West Indian colonies of the
British Empire. By 1783, an
anti-slavery movement was beginning among the British public. That
year the first British abolitionist organisation was founded by a
group of Quakers. The Quakers continued to
be influential throughout the lifetime of the movement, in many
ways leading the campaign. On 17 June 1783 the issue was formally
brought to government by Sir Cecil Wray (Member of Parliament for Retford), who
presented the Quaker petition to parliament. Also in 1783,
Dr Beilby Porteus issued a
call to the Church of England to
cease its involvement in the slave trade
and to formulate a workable policy to draw attention to and improve
the conditions of Afro-Caribbeanslaves. The exploration of the African continent, by
such British groups as the African
Association (1788), promoted the abolitionists' cause by
showing Europeans that the Africans had legitimate, complex
cultures. The African Association also had close ties with William Wilberforce, perhaps the most
important political figure in the battle for abolition in the
British Empire.

Black people also played an important part in the movement for
abolition. In Britain, Olaudah
Equiano, whose autobiography was published in nine editions in
his lifetime, campaigned tirelessly against the slave trade.

Growth of the movement

In May
1787, the Committee for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed, referring to the
Atlantic slave trade, the
trafficking in slaves by British merchants
who took manufactured goods from ports such as Bristol and
Liverpool, sold or exchanged these for slaves in West Africa where the African chieftain
hierarchy was tied to slavery, shipped the slaves to British colonies and other Caribbean countries or the American colonies, where they sold or
exchanged them mainly to the Planters for rum and sugar, which they
took back to British ports. This was the so-called Triangle trade because these mercantile
merchants traded in three places each round-trip. Political
influence against the inhumanity of the slave trade grew strongly
in the late eighteenth century. Many people, some African, some
European by descent, influenced abolition. Well known abolitionists
in Britain included James
Ramsay who had seen the cruelty of the trade at first hand,
Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and other members of the
Clapham Sect of evangelical reformers, as well as Quakers who took most of the places on the Committee for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade, having been the first to present
a petition against the slave trade to the British Parliament and
who founded the predecessor body to the Committee. As Dissenters, Quakers were not eligible to become
British MPs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, so
the Anglican evangelist William
Wilberforce was persuaded to become the leader of the parliamentary campaign.
Clarkson
became the group's most prominent researcher, gathering vast
amounts of information about the slave trade, gaining first hand
accounts by interviewing sailors and former slaves at British ports
such as Bristol, Liverpool and London.

Mainly because of Clarkson's efforts, a network of local abolition
groups was established across the country. They campaigned through
public meetings and the publication of pamphlets and petitions.
One of the earliest books promoted by Clarkson and the Committee for the
Abolition of the Slave Trade was the autobiography of the freed
slave Olaudah Equiano. The movement
had support from such freed slaves, from many denominational groups
such as Swedenborgians, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists and others, and reached out for
support from the new industrial
workers of the cities in the midlands and north of England.
Even women and children, previously un-politicised groups, became
involved in the campaign although at this date women often had to
hold separate meetings and were ineligible to be represented in the
British Parliament, as indeed were the majority of the men in
Britain.

One
particular project of the abolitionists was the negotiation with
African chieftains for the purchase of land in West African kingdoms for the establishment of
'Freetown' – a
settlement for former slaves of the British Empire and the United States, back in
west Africa.This privately negotiated settlement, later
part of Sierra
Leone eventually became protected under a British Act of
Parliament in 1807–8, after which British influence in West Africa
grew as a series of negotiations with local Chieftains were signed
to stamp out trading in slaves. These included agreements to
permit British navy ships to intercept Chieftains' ships to ensure
their merchants were not carrying slaves.

Blake's "A Negro Hung Alive by the
Ribs to a Gallows", an illustration to J.

G.

Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against
the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).

In 1796,
John Gabriel Stedman published
the memoirs of his five-year voyage to Surinam as part of a
military force sent out to subdue bosneger, former slaves living in the
inlands. The book is critical of the treatment of slaves and
contains many images by William Blake
and Francesco Bartolozzi
depicting the cruel treatment of runaway slaves. It became part of
a large body of abolitionist literature.

Slave Trade Act 1807

Plate to commemorate the abolition of
the slave trade in 1807.

The
Slave Trade Act was passed by
the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, making the slave trade illegal
throughout the British Empire. The Act imposed a fine of
£100 for every slave found aboard a British ship. Such a law was
bound to be eventually passed, given the increasingly powerful
abolitionist movement. The timing might have been connected with
the Napoleonic Wars raging at the
time. At
a time when Napoleon took the retrograde decision to revive slavery
which had been abolished during the French Revolution and to send
his troops to re-enslave the people of Haiti and the
other French Caribbean possessions, the British prohibition of the
slave trade gave the British Empire the high moral
ground.

The act's intention was to entirely outlaw the slave trade within
the British Empire, but the trade
continued and captains in danger of being caught by the Royal Navy would often throw slaves into the sea
to reduce the fine. In 1827, Britain declared that participation in
the slave trade was piracy and punishable by
death. Between 1808 and 1860, the
Royal Navy's West Africa
Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed
150,000 Africans who were aboard. Action was also taken against African
leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the
trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in
1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African
rulers.

Slavery Abolition Act 1833

"To the Friends of Negro
Emancipation", an engraving celebrating the abolition of slavery in
the British Empire in 1833.

After the 1807 act, slaves were still held, though not sold, within
the British Empire. In the 1820s, the abolitionist movement again
became active, this time campaigning against the institution of
slavery itself. In 1823 the first Anti-Slavery Society was founded in
Britain. Many of the campaigners were those who had previously
campaigned against the slave trade. Sam
Sharpe contributed to the abolition of slavery with his
Christmas rebellion in 1831.

On 28 August 1833, the Slavery
Abolition Act was given Royal
Assent, which paved the way for the abolition of slavery within
the British Empire and its colonies. On 1 August 1834, all slaves in
the British Empire were emancipated, but they were indentured to
their former owners in an apprenticeship system which was
abolished in two stages; the first set of apprenticeships came to
an end on 1 August 1838, while the final apprenticeships ended two
years later on 1 August 1840.

On the
1st of August 1834, an unarmed group of mainly elderly Negroes
being addressed by the Governor at Government House in Port of Spain, Trinidad, about the new laws, began chanting: "Pas de six
ans. Point de six ans" ("Not six years. No six years"),
drowning out the voice of the Governor. Peaceful protests continued
until a resolution to abolish apprenticeship was passed and de
facto freedom was achieved. Full emancipation for all was
legally granted ahead of schedule on 1 August, 1838, making
Trinidad the first British colony with slaves to completely abolish
slavery.The government set aside £20 million to cover compensation
of slave owners across the Empire, but the former slaves received
no compensation or reparations.

The slave trade was regulated by Louis
XIV's Code Noir. The revolt
of slaves in the largest French colony of St. Domingue in 1791 was
the beginning of what became the Haïtian Revolution led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. The institution
of slavery was first abolished in St. Domingue in 1793 by
Sonthonax, who was the Commissioner sent to St. Domingue by the
Convention, after the slave revolt of 1791, in order to safeguard
the allegiance of the population to revolutionary France. The
Convention, the first elected Assembly of the First Republic (1792–1804), then
abolished slavery in law in France and its colonies on 4 February
1794. Abbé
Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of
the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs), led by
Jacques
Pierre Brissot, were part of the abolitionist movement, which had
laid important groundwork in building anti-slavery sentiment in the
metropole. The first
article of the law stated that "Slavery was abolished" in the
French colonies, while the second article stated that "slave-owners
would be indemnified" with financial compensation for the value of
their slaves. The constitution of France passed in 1795 included in
the declaration of the Rights of Man that slavery was
abolished.

However, Napoleon did not include any
declaration of the Rights of Man in the Constitution promulgated in
1799, and decided to re-establish slavery after becoming First Consul, promulgating the law of 20 May 1802 and sending military
governors and troops to the colonies to impose it. On 10 May 1802,
Colonel Delgrès launched a
rebellion in Guadeloupe against Napoleon's representative, General Richepanse. The rebellion was
repressed, and slavery was re-established. The news of this
event sparked the rebellion that led to the loss of the lives of
tens of thousands of French soldiers, a greater loss of civilian
lives, and Haïti's gaining
independence in 1804, and the consequential loss of the second most
important French territory in the Americas, Louisiana, which was
sold to the United States of America. The French governments
refused to recognise Haiti and only did so in the 1830s when Haiti
agreed to pay a substantial amount of reparations. Then, on 27
April 1848, under the Second
Republic (1848–52), the decree-lawSchœlcher again abolished slavery.
The state bought the slaves from the colons (white
colonists; Békés in
Creole), and then freed them.

Debates about the dimensions of colonialism continue. On 10 May
2001, the Taubira law officially
acknowledge slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity. 10 May was
chosen as the day dedicated to recognition of the crime of slavery.
Anti-colonial activists also want the French Republic to recognise
African Liberation Day.

Although the crime of slavery was formally recognised, four years
later, the conservative Union for a Popular Movement
(UMP) voted on 23 February 2005 for a law to require teachers and
textbooks to "acknowledge and recognise in particular the positive
role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa."
This resolution was met with public uproar and accusations of
historic
revisionism, both inside France and abroad. Because of this
law, Abdelaziz Bouteflika,
president of Algeria, refused to sign the envisioned "friendly
treaty" with France. Famous writer Aimé Césaire, leader of the
Négritude movement, refused
to meet UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy,
who cancelled his planned visit to Martinique. President Jacques Chirac (UMP) repealed the
controversial law at the beginning of 2006.

Wallachia and Moldavia

In the
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (both now part of Romania), the enslavement of the Roma (often referred to as Gypsies) was still legal at the beginning of the
19th century. Abolitionism was associated with the
progressive pro-European and anti-Ottoman movement, which gradually
gained power in the two principalities. Between 1843 and 1855, all
of the 250,000 enslaved Roma people were liberated. Many migrated
to Western Europe and North
America.

The
Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in
Bondage was the first American abolition society, formed 14
April 1775, in Philadelphia, primarily by Quakers who
had strong religious objections to slavery.Rhode Island Quakers, associated with Moses Brown, co-founder of Brown
University, and who also settled at Uxbridge,
Massachusetts prior to 1770, were among the first in America to
free slaves. The society ceased to operate during the
Revolution and the
British occupation of Philadelphia. After the Revolution, it was
reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin
Franklin as its first president. Benjamin Rush was another leader, as were many
Quakers. John Woolman gave up most of
his business in 1756 to devote himself to campaigning against
slavery along with other Quakers. The first article published in
what later became the United States advocating the emancipation of
slaves and the abolition of slavery was allegedly written by
Thomas Paine. Titled "African Slavery
in America", it appeared on 8 March 1775 in the Postscript to
the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, more popularly
known as The Pennsylvania Magazine, or American
Museum.

Abolitionist Movement

The Abolitionist Movement set in motion actions in every state to
abolish slavery. By 1804, abolitionists succeeded in passing
legislation that would eventually (in conjunction with the 13th
amendment) emancipate the slaves in every state north of the
Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon
Line. However, emancipation in the free states
was so gradual that there were still a dozen "permanent
apprentices" in the 1860 census.

The principal organized bodies to advocate this reform were the
Society of Friends, the Pennsylvania
Antislavery Society and the New York Manumission Society.
The last was headed by powerful Federalist politicians: John Jay, Alexander
Hamilton and Republican Aaron Burr.
Thanks to the considerable efforts of the NYMS, New York abolished
slavery (gradually) in 1799. In terms of numbers of slaves, this
was the largest emancipation in American history (before 1863). New
Jersey in 1804 was the last northern state to abolish slavery
(again in gradual fashion). At the Constitutional Convention of 1787,
agreement was reached that allowed the Federal government to
abolish the international slave trade, but not prior to 1808.
By that
time, all the states had passed individual laws abolishing or
severely limiting the trade, all but Georgia by 1798; some of the Southern laws were later
repealed.

After the American
Revolutionary War, Quaker and Moravian advocates helped persuade numerous
slaveholders in the Upper South to free
their slaves. Manumissions increased for nearly two decades. Many
individual acts of manumission freed thousands of slaves in total.
Slaveholders freed slaves in such number
that the percentage of free Negroes in the Upper South increased sharply from one to ten
percent, with most of that increase in Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. By 1810 three-quarters of blacks in
Delaware were free. The most notable of individuals was Robert Carter III of Virginia, who freed
more than 450 people by "Deed of Gift", filed in 1791. This number
was more slaves than any single American had freed or would ever
free. Often slaveholders came to their decisions by their own
struggles in the Revolution; their wills and deeds frequently cited
language about the equality of men supporting their manumissions.
Slaveholders were also encouraged to do so because the economics of
the area was changing. They were shifting from labor-intensive
tobacco culture to mixed crop cultivation and did not need as many
slaves.

The free black families began to thrive, together with African
Americans free before the Revolution, mostly descendants of unions
between working class white women and African men. By 1860, in
Delaware 91.7 percent of the blacks were free, and 49.7 percent of
those in Maryland. These first free families often formed the core
of artisans, professionals, preachers and teachers in future
generations.

During
the Congressional debate on the 1820 Tallmadge Amendment, which sought to
limit slavery in Missouri as it became a state, Rufus
King declared that "laws or compacts imposing any such
condition [slavery] upon any human being are absolutely void,
because contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God, by
which he makes his ways known to man, and is paramount to all human
control." The amendment failed and Missouri became a slave
state. According to historian David
Brion Davis, this may have been the first time in the world
that a political leader openly attacked slavery’s perceived
legality in such a radical manner.

Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. Postmaster General refused
to allow the mails to carry abolition pamphlets to the South.
Northern teachers suspected of abolitionism were expelled from the
South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected
the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists. They
pointed to John Brown's
attempt in 1859 to start a slave uprising as proof that multiple
Northern conspiracies were afoot to ignite bloody slave rebellions.
Although some abolitionists did call for slave revolts, no evidence
of any other Brown-like conspiracy has been discovered. The North
felt threatened as well, for as Eric Foner concludes, "Northerners
came to view slavery as the very antithesis of the good society, as
well as a threat to their own fundamental values and interests".
However, many conservative Northerners were uneasy at the prospect
of the sudden addition to the labor pool of a huge number of freed
laborers who were used to working for very little, and thus seen as
being willing to undercut prevailing wages. . The famous, "fiery"
Abolitionist, Abby Kelley Foster,
from Massachusetts, was considered an "ultra" abolitionist who
believed in full civil rights for all black people. She held
to the views that the freed slaves would colonize Liberia. Parts of
the anti-slavery movement became known as "Abby Kellyism". She
recruited Susan B Anthony to the
movement.

Colonization and the founding of Liberia

In the early part of the 19th century, a variety of organizations
were established advocating the movement of black people from the
United States to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom;
some endorsed colonization, while others
advocated emigration. During the 1820s
and 1830s the American
Colonization Society (A.C.S.) was the primary vehicle for
proposals to return black Americans to freedom in Africa. It had
broad support nationwide among white people, including prominent
leaders such as Abraham Lincoln,
Henry Clay and James Monroe, who saw this as preferable to
emancipation, with Clay believing:
“unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never
could amalgamate with the free whites of this country". There was
however, considerable opposition among African Americans, many of
whom did not see colonization as a viable or acceptable solution to
their daunting problems in the United States. One notable opponent
of such plans was the wealthy free black abolitionist James Forten of Philadelphia.

After a
series of attempts to plant small settlements on the coast of
West Africa, the A.C.S. established the
colony of Liberia in 1821–22. Over the next four decades, it
assisted thousands of former slaves and free black people to move
there from the United States. The disease environment they
encountered was extreme, and most of the migrants died fairly
quickly. Enough survived to declare
independence in 1847. American support for colonization waned
gradually through the 1840s and 1850s, largely because of the
efforts of abolitionists to promote emancipation of slaves and
granting of American citizenship. Americo-Liberians ruled Liberia
continuously until the military coup of
1980.

Emigration

The emigrationist tradition dated back to the Revolutionary War
era. Initially, the thought was that free African Americans would
want to emigrate to Africa, but over time other ideas became
popular. After Haiti became independent, it tried to recruit
African Americans to migrate there after it re-established trade
relations with the United States. The Haytian Union was the name of a group formed
to promote relations between the countries.

Cincinnati's Black community sponsored founding the Wilberforce Colony, an initially
successful settlement of African American immigrants to
Canada. The colony was one of the first such independent
political entities. It lasted for a number of decades and provided
a destination for black Americans emigrating from a number of
locations in the United States.

Garrison and immediate emancipation

A radical shift came in the 1830s, led by William Lloyd Garrison, who demanded
"immediate emancipation, gradually achieved". That is, he demanded
that slave-owners repented immediately, and set up a system of
emancipation. Theodore Weld, an
evangelical minister, and Robert
Purvis, a free African American, joined Garrison in 1833 to
form the Anti-Slavery Society (Faragher 381). The following year
Weld encouraged a group of students at Lane Theological Seminary to
form an anti-slavery society. After the president, Lyman Beecher, attempted to suppress it, the
students moved to Oberlin
College. Due to the students' anti-slavery position,
Oberlin soon became one of the most liberal colleges and accepted
African American students. Along with Garrison, were Northcutt and
Collins as proponents of immediate abolition. These two ardent
abolitionists felt very strongly that it could not wait and that
action needed to be taken right away.

After 1840 "abolition" usually referred to positions like
Garrison's; it was largely an ideological movement led by about
3000 people, including free blacks and people of color, many of
whom, such as Frederick Douglass,
and Robert Purvis and James Forten in Philadelphia, played prominent
leadership roles. Abolitionism had a strong religious base
including Quakers, and people converted by the revivalist fervor of
the Second Great Awakening,
led by Charles Finney in the North in
the 1830s. Belief in abolition contributed to the breaking away of
some small denominations, such as the Free Methodist Church.

In the North, most opponents of slavery supported other modernizing
reform movements such as the temperance movement, public schooling, and
prison- and asylum-building. They split bitterly on the role of
women's activism.

Daniel O'Connell, the Roman Catholic leader of the Irish in
Ireland, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire
and in America. O'Connell had played a leading role in securing
Catholic Emancipation (the
removal of the civil and political disabilities of Roman Catholics
in Great Britain and Ireland) and he was one of William Lloyd Garrison's models.
Garrison recruited him to the cause of American abolitionism.
O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the
temperance priest Theobold Mayhew
organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the
United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the
United States for abolition.

The Repeal Associations in the
United States mostly took a pro-slavery position. Several reasons
have been suggested for this: that Irish immigrants were competing with free
blacks for jobs, and disliked having the same arguments used for
Irish and for black freedom; that they were loyal to the United States Constitution, which
defended their liberties, and disliked the fundamentally
extra-constitutional position of the Abolitionists; and that they
perceived abolitionism as Protestant, and were therefore suspicious
of them. In addition, slaveholders had no hesitation in voicing
their support for the freedom of Ireland, a white nation outside
the United States.

The Catholic Church in America had long ties in slaveholding
Maryland and Louisiana. Despite a firm stand for the spiritual
equality of black people, and the resounding condemnation of
slavery by Pope Gregory XVI in his bull In Supremo Apostolatus issued in
1839, the American church continued in deeds, if not in public
discourse, to support slaveholding interests. The Bishop of New
York denounced O'Connell's petition as a forgery, and if genuine,
an unwarranted foreign interference. The Bishop of Charleston
declared that, while Catholic tradition opposed slave trading, it
had nothing against slavery. No American bishop supported abolition
before the Civil War. While the war went on, they continued to
allow slave-owners to take communion.

One historian observed that ritualist churches separated themselves
from heretics rather than sinners; he observed that Episcopalians
and Lutherans also accommodated themselves to slavery. (Indeed, one
southern Episcopal bishop was a Confederate general.) There were
more reasons than religious tradition, however, as the Anglican
Church had been the established church in the South during the
colonial period. It was linked to the traditions of landed gentry
and the wealthier and educated planter classes, and the Southern
traditions longer than any other church. In addition, while the
Protestant missionaries of the Great Awakening initially opposed
slavery in the South, by the early decades of the 19th century,
Baptist and Methodist preachers in the South had come to an
accommodation with it in order to evangelize with farmers and
artisans. By the Civil War, the Baptist and Methodist churches
split into regional associations because of slavery.

After O'Connell's failure, the American Repeal Associations broke
up; but the Garrisonians rarely relapsed into the "bitter
hostility" of American Protestants towards the Roman Church. Some
antislavery men joined the Know
Nothings in the collapse of the parties; but Edmund Quincy ridiculed it as a mushroom
growth, a distraction from the real issues. Although the
Know-Nothing legislature of Massachusetts honored Garrison, he
continued to oppose them as violators of fundamental rights to
freedom of worship.

Abolitionists like William Lloyd
Garrison repeatedly condemned slavery for contradicting the
principles of freedom and equality on which the country was
founded. In 1854, Garrison wrote:

I am a believer in that portion of the Declaration of
American Independence in which it is set forth, as among
self-evident truths, "that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that
among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness."

Hence, I am an abolitionist.

Hence, I cannot but regard oppression in every form –
and most of all, that which turns a man into a thing – with
indignation and abhorrence.

Not to cherish these feelings would be recreancy to
principle.

They who desire me to be dumb on the subject of
slavery, unless I will open my mouth in its defense, ask me to give
the lie to my professions, to degrade my manhood, and to stain my
soul.

I will not be a liar, a poltroon, or a hypocrite, to
accommodate any party, to gratify any sect, to escape any odium or
peril, to save any interest, to preserve any institution, or to
promote any object.

Convince me that one man may rightfully make another
man his slave, and I will no longer subscribe to the Declaration of
Independence.

Convince me that liberty is not the inalienable
birthright of every human being, of whatever complexion or clime,
and I will give that instrument to the consuming fire.

I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery
together.

History of abolition in the United States

In The Struggle for Equality, historian James M. McPherson
defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War in the United States had
agitated for the immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of
slavery in the United States."

American abolitionism began very early, well before the United
States was founded as a nation. An early law abolishing slavery
(but not temporary indentured
servitude) in Rhode Island in 1652 floundered within 50 years.
Samuel Sewall, a prominent Bostonian
and one of the judges at the Salem
Witch Trials, wrote The Selling of Joseph in protest of the widening
practice of outright slavery as opposed to indentured servitude in
the colonies. This is the earliest-recorded anti-slavery tract
published in the future United States.

Abolitionists included those who joined the American Anti-Slavery Society
or its auxiliary groups in the 1830s and 1840s as the movement
fragmented. The fragmented anti-slavery movement included groups
such as the Liberty Party; the
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; the American Missionary
Association; and the Church Anti-Slavery Society. McPherson
describes three types of abolitionists prior to the Civil
War:

On the ideological spectrum, from immediate abolition
on the Left to conservative antislavery on the Right, it is often
hard to tell where "abolition" (which demanded unconditional
emancipation and usually envisaged civil equality for the free
slaves.) ended and "antislavery" or "free soil" (which desired only
the containment of slavery and was ambivalent on the question of
equality) began.

In New England particularly, many free soilers were abolitionists
at heart; in the mid-Atlantic states and even more in the old
Northwest, political abolitionists tended to submerge their
abolitionist identity in the broader but shallower stream of free
soil.

Vermont was the first territory (not a state at the time)
in North America to prohibit slavery in 1777. It did not
actually free slaves, but required masters to remove them from the
territory. The first state to begin a gradual abolition of slavery
was Pennsylvania in 1780, although the process was very
gradual. All importation of slaves was prohibited, but it freed no
one at first; only the slaves of masters who failed to register
them with the state, along with the future children of
enslaved mothers. Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780
law went into effect were not freed until 1847.

Massachusetts took an opposite and much more radical position. Its
Supreme Court ruled in 1783, that a black man was, indeed, a man;
and therefore free under the state's constitution.

An animation showing when states and
territories forbid or admitted slavery 1789-1861

All of
the other states north of Maryland began gradual abolition of slavery between 1781 and
1804, based on the Pennsylvania model.Rhode Island had limited slave trading in 1774 (Virginia had also attempted to do so before the Revolution,
but the Privy Council had vetoed the act) , all the other northern
states also limited the slave trade by 1786, and Georgia in
1798.These northern emancipation acts typically
provided that slaves born before the law was passed would be freed
at a certain age, and so remnants of slavery lingered; in New Jersey, a dozen "permanent apprentices" were recorded in
the 1860 census.

The institution remained solid in the South, however and that
region's customs and social beliefs evolved into a strident defense
of slavery in response to the rise of a stronger anti-slavery
stance in the North. In 1835 alone abolitionists mailed over a
million pieces of anti-slavery literature to the south. In response
southern legislators banned abolitionist literature and encouraged
harassment of anyone distributing it. Anti-slavery sentiment among
many people in the North was jolted by the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a white man and
editor of an abolitionist newspaper on 7 November 1837, by a
pro-slavery mob which destroyed his printing press. The majority of
Northerners rejected the extreme positions of the abolitionists;
Abraham Lincoln, for example. Indeed
many northern leaders including Lincoln, Stephen Douglas (the Democratic nominee in
1860), John C.Fremont (the Republican nominee in
1856), and Ulysses S.Grant married into slave owning southern
families without any moral qualms.

Abolitionism as a principle was far more than just the wish to
limit the extent of slavery. Most Northerners recognized that
slavery existed in the South and the Constitution did not allow the
federal government to intervene there. Most Northerners favored a
policy of gradual and compensated emancipation. After 1849
abolitionists rejected this and demanded it end immediately and
everywhere. John Brown was
the only abolitionist known to have actually planned a violent
insurrection, though David
Walker promoted the idea. The abolitionist movement was
strengthened by the activities of free African-Americans, especially in the black
church, who argued that the old Biblical justifications for slavery
contradicted the New Testament.
African-American activists and their writings were rarely heard
outside the black community; however, they were tremendously
influential to some sympathetic white people, most prominently the
first white activist to reach prominence, William Lloyd Garrison, who was its
most effective propagandist. Garrison's efforts to recruit eloquent
spokesmen led to the discovery of ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who eventually became
a prominent activist in his own right. Eventually, Douglass would
publish his own, widely distributed abolitionist newspaper, the
North Star.

In the early 1850s, the American abolitionist movement split into
two camps over the issue of the United States Constitution. This
issue arose in the late 1840s after the
publication of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery by
Lysander Spooner. The Garrisonians,
led by Garrison and Wendell
Phillips, publicly burned copies of the Constitution, called it
a pact with slavery, and demanded its abolition and replacement.
Another camp, led by Lysander
Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and
eventually Douglass, considered the Constitution to be an
antislavery document. Using an argument based upon Natural Law and a form of social contract theory, they said that
slavery existed outside of the Constitution's scope of legitimate
authority and therefore should be abolished.

Another split in the abolitionist movement was along class lines. The artisan republicanism of
Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright stood in stark contrast to the
politics of prominent elite abolitionists such as industrialist
Arthur Tappan and his evangelist
brother Lewis. While the former pair
opposed slavery on a basis of solidarity of "wage slaves" with
"chattel slaves", the Whiggish Tappans strongly
rejected this view, opposing the characterization of Northern
workers as "slaves" in any sense. (Lott, 129–130)

Numerous known abolitionists lived, worked, and worshipped in
Downtown Brooklyn, from Henry Ward
Beecher, who auctioned slaves into freedom from the pulpit of
Plymouth Church, to Nathan Egelston,
a leader of the African and Foreign Antislavery Society, who also
preached at Bridge Street AME and lived on Duffield Street. His
fellow Duffield Street residents, Thomas and Harriet Truesdell were
leading members of the Abolitionist movement. Mr. Truesdell was a
founding member of the Providence Anti-slavery Society before
moving to Brooklyn in 1851. Harriet Truesdell was also very active
in the movement, organizing an antislavery convention in
Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. The Tuesdell's lived at 227
Duffield Street. Another prominent Brooklyn-based abolitionist was
Rev. Joshua Leavitt, trained as a
lawyer at Yale who stopped practicing law in order to attend Yale
Divinity School, and subsequently edited the abolitionist newspaper
The Emancipator and campaigned against slavery, as well as
advocating other social reforms. In 1841 Leavitt published his
The Financial Power of Slavery, which argued that the
South was draining the national economy due to its reliance on
slavery.

After the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on 1
January 1863, abolitionists continued to pursue the freedom of
slaves in the remaining slave states,
and to better the conditions of black Americans generally. The
passage of the Thirteenth
Amendment in 1865 officially ended slavery in the United
States.

Notable opponents of slavery

National abolition dates

Slavery was abolished in these nations in these years:

Hungary: Stephen I of
Hungary, the first Hungarian Christian king, declared in his
laws (near 1000) that any slave that lives, stays or enters the
territory of the Kingdom of
Hungary would become free immediately.

Japan: In 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered all slave trading to
be abolished. His successor Tokugawa Ieyasu also continued
abolition of slavery although severe servitude was still in
practice until the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the
1860s.

Haiti: 1791,
revolt among nearly half a million slaves in the North; the French
commissioner of the colony ended slavery in 1794.

Upper Canada: 1793, by Act Against Slavery (this free-womb act
did not free any slaves, but stated that children of current slaves
would become free at age 25)

France (first time): 1794–1802, including all colonies
(although abolition was never carried out in some colonies, because
of resistance by local assemblies, or because the colonies were
under British occupation)

Lower Canada: In 1803, William Osgoode, then Chief Justice of Lower
Canada, ruled that slavery was not compatible with British law;
this freed many slaves, but some remained enslaved until the
abolition of slavery in the entire British Empire in 1833

Chile: 1811
partially, and in 1823 for all who remained as slave and "whoever
slave setting a foot on Chilean soil".

British Empire: 1833, including
all colonies (with effect from 1 August 1834; in East Indies from 1
August 1838). Slavery was ruled illegal in England in 1772. In 1807
slave trading was abolished, and the Royal Navy tasked with
suppressing it, even when carried on by non-British subjects.

Mauritius: 1 February 1835, under the British
government. This day is now a public holiday.

Spain: 1837, only for metropolis, not for colonies.

Denmark: 1848, including all colonies (3 July, Danish West
Indies)

France (second time): 1848, including all colonies

Peru:
African-Peruvian slaves were nominally released in 1821 by
Gen. San Martin, but they did not get actual freedom until
Ramon Castilla's decree of 1851.
Chinese labourers replaced the African slaves since then and worked
on a semi-slavery regime, until they were mostly freed by Chilean
troops during the War of the
Pacific in 1880. Native Peruvians in some regions of the
country continued working in slave-like conditions under a regime
that had begun as encomiendas during the
Spanish rule, which was finally abolished by Gen. Juan Velasco in 1969, the year de
facto slavery finally ended in Peru.

Mauritania: July 1980 (still formally abolished by French
authorities in 1905, then implicitly in the new constitution of
1961 and expressly in October that year when the country joined the
United Nations), actually still
practiced.Slavery in
Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.

Niger:
2003. Slave markets in Niger were closed during the French
colonization, but slavery in Niger was finally criminalized as late
as in 2003 (came into force a year later).

Nepal:
2008. The government abolished the Haliya system of forced
labour, freeing about 20,000 people.

Commemoration

The abolitionist movements and the abolition of slavery have been
commemorated in different ways around the world in modern times.
The United Nations General Assembly declared 2004 the
International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and
its Abolition. This proclamation marked the bicentenary of the
birth of the first black state, Haiti. Numerous exhibitions, events
and research programmes were connected to the initiative.

2007 witnessed major exhibitions in British museums and galleries
to mark the anniversary of the 1807 abolition act – 1807
Commemorated 2008 marks the 201st anniversary of the Abolition
of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. It also marks the 175th
anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in the British
Empire.

The Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa held a major
international conference entitled, "Routes to Freedom: Reflections
on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade," from 14 to
16 March 2008. Actor and human rights activist Danny Glover delivered the keynote speech
announcing the creation of two major scholarships intended for
University of Ottawa law students specializing in international law
and social justice at the conference's gala dinner.

Brooklyn, New York has begun work on commemorating the abolitionist
movement in New York.

Contemporary abolitionism

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and
the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Although outlawed in most countries, slavery is nonetheless
practiced secretly in many parts of the world. Enslavement still
takes place in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, as well as parts of Africa, the
Middle East, and South Asia. There are an
estimated 27 million victims of slavery worldwide. In Mauritania
alone, estimates are that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or
20% of the population, are enslaved. Many of them are used as
bonded labour.

Modern-day abolitionists have emerged over the last several years,
as awareness of slavery around the world has grown, with groups
such as Anti-Slavery
International, the American Anti-Slavery Group,
International Justice
Mission, and Free the Slaves
working to rid the world of slavery. Zach
Hunter, for example, began a movement called Loose Change to
Loosen Chains when he was in seventh grade. Also featured on
CNN and other national news organizations,
Hunter has gone on to help inspire other teens and young adults to
take action against injustice with his books, Be the
Change and Generation Change.

In the United States, The Action Group to End Human Trafficking and
Modern-Day Slavery is a coalition of NGOs,
foundations and
corporations working to develop a
policy agenda for abolishing slavery and human trafficking.
Since
1997, the United States Department of
Justice has, through work with the Coalition of Immokalee
Workers, prosecuted six individuals in Florida on charges of
slavery in the agricultural industry. These prosecutions
have led to freedom for over 1000 enslaved workers in the tomato
and orange fields of South Florida. This is only one example of the
contemporary fight against slavery worldwide. Slavery exists most
widely in agricultural labor, apparel and sex industries, and
service jobs in some regions.

In 2000, the United States passed the Victims of Trafficking and
Violence Protection Act (TVPA) "to combat trafficking in persons,
especially into the sex trade, slavery, and involuntary servitude."
The TVPA also "created new law enforcement tools to strengthen the
prosecution and punishment of traffickers, making human trafficking
a Federal crime with severe penalties."

The
United
States Department of State publishes the annual Trafficking in Persons Report,
identifying countries as either Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List
or Tier 3, depending upon three factors: "(1) The extent to which
the country is a country of origin, transit, or destination for
severe forms of trafficking; (2) The extent to which the government
of the country does not comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards
including, in particular, the extent of the government’s
trafficking-related corruption; and (3) The resources and
capabilities of the government to address and eliminate severe
forms of trafficking in persons."

No Compromise with Slavery, 1854, by Wm. L. Garrison
retrieved from
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/rbaapc:@field(DOCID+@lit(rbaapc11000div2));
also Mayer: All in the Fire, pp. 65–67, 475.

Lauber, Almon Wheeler, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times
Within the Present Limits of the United States. New York:
Columbia University, 1913. Chapter
5. HTML version accessed from Dinsmore Documentation See also the Rhode
Island Historical Society FAQ.

The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the
NAACP by James M. McPherson, p. 4